In 2011, the New York City Mayor's Office, the Open Society Foundations, Bloomberg Philanthropies, and over 20 local agencies launched the Young Men's Initiative (YMI), a citywide effort to improve outcomes for Black and Latino young men in the areas of education, health, employment, and criminal justice. YMI is one of the single largest…

The Algebra Project DR K-12, funded by the National Science Foundation as a Research and Development Project, addressed the challenge of offering significant STEM content for students to ensure public literacy and workforce readiness. The project's primary purpose was to test the feasibility and effectiveness of a model for establishing four-year…

In this brief, a program evaluation is defined, address common concerns program managers and practitioners have regarding evaluation, and outline five major reasons why conducting a program evaluation can benefit an out-of-school time program. Program evaluation is a valuable tool for program managers who are seeking to strengthen the quality of…

This paper details a semi-structured interview protocol that evaluators can use to develop a logic model of a program's services and outcomes. The protocol presents a series of questions, which evaluators can ask of specific program informants, that are designed to: (1) identify key informants basic background and contextual information, (2)…

This chapter begins with a commentary by King, a longtime admirer of Cousins and Whitmore, in which she discusses why their 1998 article on participatory evaluation is considered an important contribution to the field. Participatory evaluation was not a new idea in 1998. By the mid-1990s articles, chapters, and books that described evaluations…

The authors describe their experiences assessing writing-across-the-curriculum and general education programs, paying particular attention to processes and their consequences. At the University of Hawai'i at Manoa (UHM), a relatively large research-extensive university, general education assessment activities have been designed around two goals:…

This article elaborates on how the technical capabilities of virtual reality support the constructivist learning principles. It introduces VRID, a model for instructional design and development that offers explicit guidance on how to produce an educational virtual environment. The define phase of VRID consists of three main tasks: forming a…

School principals can foster effective literacy instruction by orchestrating community collaboration in an ongoing cycle of literacy program development, implementation, evaluation, and revision outlined in this ten-step plan. The steps address forming a community advisory board, appointing a building literacy leader, forming a literacy team,…

This document presents the report on the formative evaluation of the Aboriginal Skills and Employment Partnership (ASEP) program conducted by Human Resources and Skills Development Canada (HRSDC), covering the period from November 2003 to November 2006. The report is organized into four sections. Section 1 presents an overview of the ASEP program…

Many school districts offer alternative education programs for their students who do not succeed in the regular classroom. At the high school level, many of these programs are separated from the regular schools. It seemed that many districts were establishing alternative education programs, but there were differences in the types of programs that…

This report discusses the issues surrounding the disciplinary alternative education programs (DAEPs) in Texas, its updated findings, and the authors' recommendations on what the state should do to address DAEP problems. DAEPs were supposed to be for criminal offenses--drug-related activities, gun violations and assault--all violations that had…

This document is the second quarterly progress report for the evaluation of Juvenile Justice Crime Prevention Act (JJCPA) programs for the Los Angeles County Probation Department. The report covers the period from July 1, 2008, through September 30, 2008. The intent of the report is to provide Probation and the community-based organizations (CBOs)…

Across the nation, school policymakers are grappling with what to do about the increasing numbers of students who do not advance beyond ninth grade. National estimates put the student attrition rate before tenth grade at between 11 and 33 percent, and only about 70 percent of ninth graders make it to graduation. This policy brief focuses on one…

In fiscal year 2008, about 31 million children participated in the National School Lunch Program and more than 10 million children participated in the School Breakfast Program each school day. The U.S. Department of Agriculture's (USDA) Food and Nutrition Service (FNS) spent $11.7 billion on the school meal programs in that year. The majority of…

The materials in this toolkit contain information about the five core components of a service-learning project: investigation, planning and preparation, action, reflection, and demonstration/celebration. Also included are the standards and indicators of K-12 service-learning. The information is organized into an overview and five chapters, each…